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      Mighty Shiva Was Never Meant to Live in Manhattan

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      “What if museums give back so much art that they have nothing left to display?” As a scholar of the debates about returning cultural objects to the countries from which they were stolen, I have, over the years, heard many variations of that question. “Museums have lots and lots of stuff,” I usually answer, fighting the urge to roll my eyes. “It’s not like they’re just going to shut down.”But in December, the Metropolitan Museum of Art announced it would return a substantial proportion of its Khmer-era works to Cambodia, which is claiming still more, including nearly all the museum’s major Cambodian pieces. Last month, the American Museum of Natural History indefinitely closed two of its halls in response to new federal regulations about the display of Native American sacred and burial artifacts. Now Manhattan’s Rubin Museum of Art, which features art from the Himalayas, has announced that it will close later this year. The museum says the decision is unrelated to issues of cultural repatriation, but it comes after the museum faced many accusations of cultural theft and returned some prized pieces.Clearly, I need to change my answer.When stolen artifacts go back to their rightful owners, it is now clear, some display cases will indeed empty out, some galleries will shut their doors, and entire museums may even close. But it’s worth it. Repatriating these precious items is still the right thing to do, no matter the cost.Why? Museums are supposed to educate us about other ways of being in the world. But looted artifacts alone — removed from their original context, quarantined in an antiseptic display case — cannot do this. Unlike, say, Impressionist paintings or Pop Art sculptures, ritual objects were not meant to be seen in a gallery at a time of the viewer’s choosing. Used alongside music, scents and tastes, these holy relics are tools to help participants in rituals achieve a transcendent experience. Imagine looking at a glow stick necklace and thinking it could teach you what it’s like to greet the sunrise dancing ecstatically with hundreds of strangers.The Rubin Museum, which displays art from Tibet, Nepal and elsewhere in the Himalayan region, returned two stolen objects to Nepal in 2022 and last year surrendered another, a spectacular 16th-century mask depicting one of Shiva’s manifestations. By chance, I heard the news about the Rubin’s closing while I was looking at photographs from the mask’s homecoming ceremony.The mask was one of a nearly identical pair depicting the snarling deity with golden skulls and snakes twining through blood-red hair. For centuries, they had been featured in an annual ceremony, in which worshipers sought blessings by drinking rice beer from the masks’ lips. In the mid 1990s they were both stolen from the home of the family that was entrusted to care for them when the ceremony was not underway.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Amid a Fraught Process, Penn Museum Entombs Remains of 19 Black People

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      Skulls from a collection used to further racist science have been laid to rest. Questions surrounding the interment have not.There was very little that could be said about the 19 people who were eulogized on Saturday morning in a service at the University of Pennsylvania. Their names were lost, and not much about their lives was known beyond the barest facts: an old age spent in the poorhouse, a problem with cavities. They were Black people who had died in obscurity over a century ago, now known almost entirely by the skulls they left behind. Even some of these scant facts have been contested.Much more could be said about what led to the service. “This moment,” said the Rev. Jesse Wendell Mapson, a local pastor involved in planning the commemoration and interment of the 19, “has not come without some pain, discomfort and tension.”On this everyone could agree.The University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, like cultural and research institutions worldwide, has been grappling with a legacy of plunder, trying to decide what to do about artifacts and even human bones that were collected from people and communities against their will and often without their knowledge.Human remains, which are in the repositories of institutions all across the country, present a particularly delicate challenge. The Samuel G. Morton Cranial Collection, which has been at the Penn Museum since 1966, is an especially notorious example, with more than a thousand skulls gathered in furtherance of vile ideas about race.Drummers at the start of the commemoration service at the Penn Museum on Saturday.Kriston Jae Bethel for The New York TimesThe museum plans to repatriate hundreds of craniums from all over the world, but the process has been fraught from the beginning. Its first step — the entombment at a nearby cemetery of the skulls of Black Philadelphians found in the collection — has drawn heavy criticism, charged by activists and some experts with being rushed and opaque.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trump Is Selling Pieces of His Mug Shot Suit

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      It’s not just a piece of political memorabilia — it’s a strategy.When Donald J. Trump walked into a Georgia courthouse on Aug. 24 to be booked as part of his fourth criminal indictment, becoming the first former president (and only current presidential candidate) to have a mug shot taken, the picture seemed destined to become a symbol of this fraught, unprecedented moment in American history. As has become increasingly clear, however, Mr. Trump and his team have come to see the mug shot in a different way.Specifically, as the source material for a new strain of political pop culture mythmaking and memorabilia.Almost overnight they splashed the image, with Mr. Trump’s signature glower, across mugs, T-shirts and posters in their campaign store, using it and all it represents as a key component of their fund-raising. Then, this week, NFT INT, the official licensee of the Trump name and image for digital trading cards, began selling a special “Mugshot Edition” NFT set that includes, for a certain few willing to buy the whole thing, pieces of the blue suit and red tie Mr. Trump wore in the photo.Or, as the NFT INT website calls the garment, “The most historically significant artifact in American history.”The 47 cards on offer were created by the artist Clark Mitchell and depict Mr. Trump as, for example, Captain America, and sitting in for Lincoln in the Lincoln Memorial. Cards can be bought individually for $99 or as a full set that runs for $4,653 and includes a physical trading card (some of which will be signed by Mr. Trump) with a swatch of suit fabric and an invitation to a special dinner at Mar-a-Lago. Those who buy 100 of the NFT cards receive a swatch of the jacket or pants, plus a swatch of the tie and the dinner at Mar-a-Lago.According to the NFT INT website, the suit is “priceless.” There are enough tiny suit pieces for 2,024 buyers (because, you know, election year), and enough tie pieces for 225.In other words, it’s not just a suit. It’s a font of potential relics — one that positions the mug shot suit as the most important suit of Mr. Trump’s career so far, rather than, say, Mr. Trump’s inauguration suit.The mug shot edition is just the latest in a series of NFT cards released on the site portraying former President Donald J. Trump.NFT INTThe mug shot edition is the third set of NFT cards released, with the first two drops selling out in “a little more than 24 hours,” according to Kevin Mercuri, a spokesman for NFT INT and the chief executive of Propheta Communications. The new offering comes complete with a video of Mr. Trump endorsing the drop — and the suit — at the top of the web page. Mr. Mercuri said the idea for selling the suit swatches came from NFT INT and was inspired by the way sports figures sell pieces of their jerseys to fans. Mr. Trump was “aware of the trend and receptive” to the proposal, he said, and “generously gave the suit to NFT INT. He felt that members of the public would want to have a piece of history.”The suit was then authenticated by MEARS, a company that specializes in validating sports memorabilia. Troy R. Kinunen, the chief executive of the company, said that “the team at CollectTrumpCards provided the suit directly from the President” and that MEARS then verified certain design elements of the garment against photos and video, including pocket placement, buttons, and the collar of the suit jacket, which Mr. Trump had sewn down in the back to keep it in place. (Though given the number of blue suits Mr. Trump appears to own, it is hard to know how anyone could tell them apart.)Selling the mug shot suit tracks, to a certain extent, with other examples of fan culture. Paige Rubin, an assistant vice president and the head of sale for handbags at Christie’s, said there was an almost insatiable public appetite for souvenirs of the famous and infamous, and often the most valuable pieces of memorabilia at auction are determined by provenance: “Does the object you are selling resonate with the fan base? Does it connect to an iconic moment in a career?”Similarly, there is a long tradition of auctioning memorabilia from public figures, including many presidents, as Summer Anne Lee, a historian of presidential dress at the Fashion Institute of Technology, noted. Scraps of Abraham Lincoln’s bloodstained bedsheets regularly come up for auction, and a pair of Richard Nixon’s eyeglasses from around the time of his resignation were sold in 2005 for $1,955. In 2019, a pair of underpants believed to have belonged to Eva Braun, Hitler’s wife, were gaveled at almost $5,000.However, despite the fact that Melania Trump likewise sold one of her most notable White House outfits — the white hat she wore during the French state visit in 2018 — as part of her own NFT drop, and despite Mr. Trump’s own history of monetizing his own brand in a way other political candidates might not dare, it is almost unheard-of for a living president to hawk his own memorabilia for his own profits, Ms. Lee said. Though NFT INT is not related to the Trump organization and Mr. Trump is not a part of the company, as a licenser Mr. Trump would probably receive a percentage of sales.Which makes it in his interest to divide the suit into as many pieces as possible — both financially and, even more pointedly, conceptually.After all, if a garment is considered “historic,” keeping it whole would seem the more desirable choice. That would allow it to be exhibited in a museum, or a presidential library (or, in the case of Marilyn Monroe’s “Happy Birthday, Mr. President” dress, Ripley’s Believe It or Not! museum).On the other hand, most tiny scraps of clothing that exist in collections are religious curios, fragments of martyrs’ gowns. Treating the mug shot suit in the same way “suggests Trump believes the suit he wore for his mug shot will be even more motivational to his fans than any other,” Ms. Lee said. “They are offering it like pieces of religious clothing, which implies Mr. Trump is a saint who has been through trials and tribulations for the country.”Indeed, said Sean Wilentz, a professor of American history at Princeton University, the sale suggests a “quasi-religious element, as if the suit Trump wore in court has special charismatic qualities.”Well, one of the cards in the set does depict Mr. Trump as a golden god. More

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      Speech and Antisemitism on Campus

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      More from our inbox:If Joe Manchin Runs for President …Jill Stein’s CandidacyPrivate Art CollectionsPro-Israel demonstrators at Columbia University in New York in mid-October.Jeenah Moon/ReutersTo the Editor:Re “How Are Students Expected to Live Like This on Campuses?,” by Jesse Wegman (Opinion, nytimes.com, Nov. 8):Mr. Wegman is correct that universities cannot live up to their ideals as havens for unfettered debate when their Jewish students feel physically threatened. And he rightly suggests necessary limits on a culture of free speech, including prohibitions on harassment and targeting based on ethnic or religious identity.But it is time for a broader interrogation of the vaunted Chicago Principles he cites, which hold that the only appropriate role for a university is to stay silent on matters of public controversy so that its constituents may fully debate it.I believe that a more important principle for a university — arguably its fundamental principle — is to seek and articulate truth. And in this case, the truth is clear: Hamas is a terrorist organization, dedicated to the destruction of the state of Israel, that is not representative of the Palestinian people as a whole.To the extent the Chicago Principles prevent universities from stating that truth, they make honest debate more difficult, stain all pro-Palestinian students with the repugnant reputation of Hamas, and undermine university administrators’ ability to isolate and combat real antisemitism on campuses.There is no doubt that free expression is a paramount value in universities. But we can aspire higher. We can build our bastions of free speech on the foundational layers of moral clarity and intellectual integrity.(Rabbi) Ari BermanNew YorkThe writer is president of Yeshiva University.To the Editor:Re “What Is Happening on College Campuses Is Not Free Speech,” by Gabriel Diamond, Talia Dror and Jillian Lederman (Opinion guest essay, Nov. 11):Protecting free speech on campus requires bravery and intellectual honesty, not partisan definitions. As Jewish students, we share in the real fear surrounding the rise of violent threats against our communities. Yet, this fear cannot be addressed with definitions that marginalize legitimate Palestinian advocacy.The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism that the authors cite, which refers to “rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism,” is opposed even by several progressive, pro-Israel and Jewish organizations. Such critiques correctly cite the definition’s potential to “suppress legitimate free speech, criticism of Israeli government actions, and advocacy for Palestinian rights.”Institutions of higher education should, of course, address antisemitism; yet, adopting this broad definition would come at the expense of students’ and professors’ fundamental rights to free expression. Regardless of how uncomfortable certain phrases may make us, disagreements surrounding terminology and definitions must not be equated with the very real dangers of death threats, hate speech and physical violence.Upholding free speech requires empathy and consistency, and we must understand that intimidation and fear on campuses are real, and they are not felt only or even primarily by Jewish students.Eliana BlumbergRita FederMichael Farrell-RosenProvidence, R.I.The writers are students at Brown University.To the Editor:Re “At College, Debating When Speech Goes Too Far” (front page, Nov. 11):A key role of higher education is to nurture students intellectually and emotionally as they develop their ethical and moral compasses. Just as alumni have threatened to pull financial support of schools that do not call out terror and take a stance on antisemitism, members of university boards must require similar action.As a member of a university board of trustees whose president has publicly spoken up for morality and truth, and as an American who is shocked to see scenes unfolding that are reminiscent of 1930s Europe, I challenge all the university boards in the country to raise their voices and make their leadership accountable for what is happening on their campuses.There is zero tolerance for racism and zero tolerance for harassment of any kind on today’s campuses, and we should not rest until there is zero tolerance for antisemitism. Colleges should be places where truth is sought and where everyone feels safe. University leaders must step up and lead by example by first speaking up and then creating an action plan to combat hate and antisemitism.Lawrence D. PlattLos AngelesThe writer is a member of the board of trustees of Touro University.To the Editor:If college students directed this sort of hate speech against Black or Asian or L.G.B.T.Q. people, they would most likely be expelled or at least suspended. The fact that they aren’t speaks to the moral cowardice of university administrators.Joshua RosenbaumBrooklynIf Joe Manchin Runs for President …“I have made one of the toughest decisions of my life,” Mr. Manchin said.Haiyun Jiang for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “In Blow to Senate Democrats, Manchin Will Not Run Again” (front page, Nov. 10):The concern spreading among “alarmed” Democrats that the prospective third-party presidential campaign of Senator Joe Manchin would draw more votes away from President Biden may be misplaced.Although he is a Democrat and caucuses and usually votes with the Democrats, many of Mr. Manchin’s positions are inconsistent with those in the base of the party, and he is not particularly liked by other segments of the party or left-leaning independents either.If he runs, rather than siphoning votes from the Biden-Harris ticket, he might draw as many, or more, anti-Democratic independents and disenchanted G.O.P. voters. That is especially the case if the Republican Party’s candidate is former President Donald Trump, as seems increasingly likely, and Mr. Manchin’s fusion running mate is a respectable Republican like Liz Cheney or even Nikki Haley.So, Democrats should take a page from the quarterback Aaron Rodgers, who, when a mainstay of the Green Bay Packers, periodically soothed uneasy fans with one word: “Relax.”Marshall H. TanickMinneapolisJill Stein’s CandidacyJill Stein will be running to the left of President Biden and is joining a group of third-party candidates who are making some Democrats fearful that they could siphon support from his re-election bid.Kim Raff for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “Stein Plans to Seek Green Party’s Nomination for President” (news article, Nov. 11):There are two questions that all third-party candidates should ask themselves: First, do they really think they can win the presidency? If they are honest, I think they would respond, “Of course not.”Second question: Do they want Donald Trump to be president? Again, I think the answer for all of them would be, “Of course not.”Which then would reveal that ego is driving them and the desire for a larger, more public forum for their ideas. But the price of that drive could very well be catastrophic damage to our country and our democracy if Mr. Trump wins. And each third-party candidate dangerously increases the chances that could happen.Sally JorgensenSanta Cruz, Calif.Private Art CollectionsTo the Editor:Re “Will the Art World Need to Slash Its Prices?” (Arts, Nov. 4):It is auction season and masterpieces by Picasso, Monet and others will be sold, often by the descendants of dead billionaires to living billionaires for their very private collections.True lovers of art would donate these gems to museums, so the public can see them. Just another example of the greed of the wealthiest 1 percent, completely unconcerned about the rest of us.Jim DouglasOcean Grove, N.J. More